At Khaan Kili the train negotiated a series of sharp curves, and at the last remote regional stop before Chaman we climbed down with a few dusty locals and were met by a covered truck. When the area was deserted we climbed onto the extravagantly decorated truck, and followed the main road toward Chaman. Before we reached the town, however, we took a side road that seemed to end in a deserted track, with a stand of trees and several scrubby pastures, about thirty kilometres north of the main highway and the Chaman Pass.
We climbed down from the truck, and as it drove away we mustered in the shade of the trees with the main group of men, who’d been waiting there for us. It was the first time that we’d assembled in our full number. There were thirty of us, all men, and for a moment I was reminded of the men who gathered in similar groups in prison yards. The fighters seemed tough and determined and, although many of them were lean to the point of being thin, they looked healthy and fit.
I removed my sunglasses. As I scanned the faces, my eyes met those of a man who stared back at me from the heart of darkness. He was in his late forties or early fifties, and perhaps the oldest man in the group after Khaderbhai. His short hair was grey beneath a brown, round-edged Afghan cap, identical to the one I wore myself. His short, straight nose divided a long, pointed face that was so deeply lined beneath the sunken cheeks that it appeared to have been slashed with a machete. Heavy bags hung below his eyes. Theatrically peaked eyebrows like the wings of a black bat spiked above his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves that caught and held me.
As I locked eyes with him, returning his psychotic stare, the man began to stumble toward me. After the first few shambling steps, his body twitched into a more efficient mode, and he began to lope, covering the thirty metres that separated us in long, crouching, feline strides. Forgetting that the gun was strapped to my side, my hand instinctively moved to the hilt of my knife and I took half a pace backward with my right foot. I knew the eyes. I knew the look. The man wanted to fight me, perhaps even to kill me.
Just as he reached me, shouting something in a dialect that I couldn’t recognise, Nazeer stepped from nowhere to stand in front of me and bar his way. He shouted something back at the man, but the other ignored him, staring past his head at me and shouting his question, again and again. Nazeer repeated his reply, shouting to match the other. The crazed fighter tried to shove Nazeer out of the way with both hands, but he might as well have tried to push aside a tree. The burly Afghan stood his ground, forcing the madman to shift his gaze from me for the first time.
A crowd had formed around us. Nazeer held the man’s lunatic stare, and spoke in softer, pleading tones. I waited, tensed and ready to fight.
‘He was asking if you are a Russian,’ Ahmed Zadeh muttered from beside me, his Algerian accents rolling over the R in Russian. I flicked a glance at him, and he pointed at my hip. ‘The gun. And your pale eyes. He thinks you are a Russian.’
Khaderbhai walked between the men, and put his hand on the madman’s shoulder. The man turned immediately, and with eyes that seemed ready to weep, searched Khader’s face. Khader repeated what Nazeer had been murmuring, in a similarly soothing tone. I couldn’t understand all of it, but the sense was clear.
When the man turned to face me once more, his expression had changed so dramatically that I was moved to pity him, when a moment before I was ready to run my knife into his chest. His eyes were still deranged, hanging unnaturally wide and white beneath the brown irises, but his frenzied expression had collapsed into such wretched, pitiable misery that his face reminded me of the many ruined stone cottages we’d seen beside the roads. He looked once more into Khader’s face, and the stutter of a smile flickered across his features as if animated by an electric pulse. He turned and walked away through the crowd. The tough men parted for him warily, compassion vying with fear in their eyes as they watched him pass.
